Traffic control glitches rarer as FAA upgrades system

May 1, 2014
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An American Airlines Boeing 767 waits Wednesday to take off at Los Angeles International Airport. The Federal Aviation Administration halted flights temporarily at the airport because of a computer glitch. / AP

by Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

by Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

The failure of the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic control computer in Los Angeles inconvenienced travelers with delays but didn't send planes dangerously close to each other, according to safety experts.

Such computer problems are rarer than in past decades, as the FAA upgrades its computers, according to experts. During the upgrade, the agency continues to use the system to monitor flights, which has left the improvement work years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, according to government auditors.

The failure Wednesday at the regional Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale left controllers temporarily unable to track planes across Southern California and parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

The FAA called a ground stop â?? preventing more planes from taking off toward Los Angeles â?? at 3:09 p.m. PT for about an hour. The problem canceled 50 flights arriving and departing at Los Angeles International Airport with a total of 6,800 passengers and delayed 455 flights, according to the airport.

"No one â?? I don't care who you are in the FAA â?? no one is going to operate this very complex and sophisticated system in a degraded format," said Sid McGuirk, an associate professor in air-traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, who worked 25 years at an FAA regional control center.

In Los Angeles, departures returned to normal around 11 p.m. PT and arrivals at midnight.

In a statement Thursday, FAA said it was still investigating what caused the problem. "The FAA will fully analyze the event to resolve any underlying issues that contributed to the incident and prevent a recurrence," the statement said.

John Cox, a former airline pilot who is a consultant as president of Safety Operating Systems, said the computer failure is a concern, but planes in this case never got too close to each other.

"The contingency plan worked," Cox said. "Within a couple of hours, things were moving at full speed."

Capt. Patrick Smith, an airline pilot who blogs at askthepilot.com, said occasional computer problems are understandable as the system is upgraded, although flight delays frustrate travelers.

"Well, I suppose we can give Los Angeles Center a mulligan on this one, seeing that air-traffic control breakdowns are a lot less common than they once were," Smith said.

FAA workers from the union Professional Aviation Safety Specialists said the results could have been worse if they hadn't gotten the equipment back online quickly.

"The quick response and attention to detail by FAA systems specialists prevented a bad situation from becoming a disaster," said Mike Perrone, president of PASS. "Had the computer crash occurred without proper staff in place, the delays would have been far worse."

Jessica Cigich, a spokeswoman for the union, said the outage is being investigated. "There was so much information coming into the system that it overloaded," Cigich said.

The computer system is called En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM), which keeps track of flights between airports in 20 zones across the continental USA.

The Government Accountability Office warned in September 2012 that the $2.2 billion upgrade begun in 2003 was nearly four years behind schedule and $330 million more expensive than estimated.

"It's like driving down Interstate 95 at 75 mph and getting a flat tire, and you can't pull over to the side of the road because the system can't be shut down because people are relying on it all across the country," McGuirk said.